Some existing systems attempt to manage the inventory of storage devices accessed by virtual machines (VMs), containers, and other cloud-native applications. For instance, these systems name a disk on a storage device by its relationship to a reference such as a VM, instead of giving the storage device a unique identifier. This results in a storage device identity which is not persistent, but rather changes throughout the lifecycle of the storage device, and requires changes to paths as the reference (in this example, the VM) associated with the disk changes. As such, the existing systems for managing data storage devices through references such as VMs, containers, or other cloud-native applications are not as compatible with data-centric processing and applications, which concern the acquisition, processing, analysis, storage and query of large data sets.
Although some existing solutions exist for managing storage devices, these solutions are centralized, and often cumbersome and transitory. Some of the existing systems require networking management with their own concepts of clusters. Using such solutions creates requirements for the host administrators to also maintain configurations for them. This imposes a higher burden for the administrator, as well as a higher cost in resource use.